


sensitive to fate, not denial

by RogerMexico



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Derse twins, EoA 5, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-04
Updated: 2012-01-04
Packaged: 2017-10-26 12:04:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/282885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RogerMexico/pseuds/RogerMexico
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two children await their deaths.</p>
            </blockquote>





	sensitive to fate, not denial

**Author's Note:**

> I've had this sitting around on my computer since [S]Cascade, dragging my feet on writing the final part. I finally decided I might as well just post what I've got so far. Enjoy.
> 
> Thanks to [lantadyme](http://lantadyme.tumblr.com) for the beta read, and to Interpol for writing the song that I shamelessly stole the title from.

The carapace menaces you with his spear, and you considering calling upon the dark gods, but then his head is on the floor and someone is stepping through your window.

"'sup," he says, as if he hadn't just decapitated someone and he wasn't still holding a bloody, shattered sword in one hand.

"Strider," you nod. "How nice of you to join us."

"You know me, Lalonde. Can't resist a good suicide mission. The Book of Egbert teaches that if I sacrifice myself to blow up the Green Sun, I get to go to a shitty jpeg paradise."

"That does sound awfully tempting, but are you sure that this isn't actually due to some misguided altruistic tendancies?"

He just gives you a look for that one, and you decide not to push the subject.

"I suppose I do owe you my thanks for rescuing me from our would-be assassin. It's awfully hard to blow oneself up when one has already been brutally murdered."

"Oh you know me. Anything for a pretty face."

The two of you laugh, a potentially meaningful conversation artfully defused. Strider tosses the severed head out the window, and you help him dump the rest of the corpse out after it. The two of you watch it tumble into the infinite blackness.

And you stand there and watch, until a not-quite memory surfaces.

It's been four weeks since you lost John and Jade, and the loneliness has been taking it's toll on you both. You sit together in your house, planning strategy until the constant reminder that you're trapped, that you fucked up, that you are going to die becomes too much to bear.

You both stop talking nearly simultaneously, and a shared look is all you need to make up your mind. Strider follows you up to your bedroom, and you throw a pile of your knitting on the ground. You both lay down and you grip his hand tight until you fall asleep.

Derse, for all its quiet menace, seems like the only haven left to you now. Here among the purple spires, it's okay to forget for a moment that two of your best friends are dead (smashedintoabloodypulp/obliteratedbymeteors). It's okay to be two thirteen year old kids.

On Derse, you're safe, and you're free.

Strider swoops wildly off into the distance, a purple streak against a purple backdrop. He flies like a startled bird, dodging back and forth and never _ever_ looking back.

You swear you can hear him laughing.

"Strider, how would you like to go flying?"

With your head turned like this he can't see your tears.

\--

The two of you swoop and soar through the gloomy streets of Derse's moon, twin specks of white in a world of purple. The memories of your doomed dreamself insist that this is an occasion for joy, even though you know you fly to your deaths.

Fuck it. Life is short.

You swoop in and playfully tag Strider. He looks taken aback for a second, and then he sees your look of mocking challenge, and he leaps for you with a shout. You soar out of reach but he's fast enough to tag you back, and then your semi-aimless wandering turns to an all-out game of chase. Strider has speed, but you have agility and grace, and it's an even match as you dodge through the streets, Strider right in front of you with Liv sitting on his shoulders, egging him on.

Your game takes you deeper and deeper into the moon, and when you finally do catch him it's because he's stopped short, a look of genuine shock plastered across his face.

That's how you know something is dreadfully wrong, because you may have only met him a few hours ago, but you also spent four months with him, huddled together at the end of a dead-end timeline and one thing you learned is that Dave Strider does not do shocked.

You peer over his shoulder to see what has managed to render him speechless, and that's when you see them.

Two stone slabs, floating perfectly still at the center of the moon.

Two stone slabs, one orange and one red, one emblazoned with the sun and one bearing the insignia of the gear.

Two quest beds, two funeral pyres, for two children with no more lives left to give.

"Fuck," you hear Strider mutter, and though personally you would have put it more elegantly, you can't help agreeing with the sentiment.

You fly over and alight on the cold surface of your slab, and out of the corner of your eye you see him do the same. A shared glance, a wordless exchange, and then you uncaptchalogue The Tumor.

It's huge. You had no idea of the scale, and though you know on an intellectual level that no matter the size The Tumor would have killed you anyway, you can't help but feel a pang of fear. That's when the shell sloughs off, exposing for the first time the actual mechanism that will shortly kill you.

The thing is a menacing snarl of cables and tubes, and there in the center of the horrible mass is what must be the countdown timer.

It reads 5:35.

Five minutes and change until a bomb the size of two universes rips you to shreds and vaporizes your bones, leaving nothing behind, not even a sad little obituary about a young life tragically cut short.

You think you are going to be sick. You think you are going to burst into tears. You think you might pass out.

But you're Rose Lalonde, so instead you turn to Strider.

"I hope you're taking notes, dear brother, because this is what true irony looks like."

"Hardy-har. I am literally shitting myself with laughter here."

"I'm glad to see you appreciate the humor of the situation."

"Humor? Lalonde, this is straight-up fucked. This is so painfully ironic that it's passed straight through cool and looped back into Egbert territory. This is so downright uncool that they'll make a Lifetime Original Movie about this shit and have Nic Cage and Matt Macconahay star in it."

"Cage _and_ McConaughey? Dare I ask which one will be slated to portray me?"

"Cage, of course. Everyone knows that I'm the tousle-haired heartthrob of this little team."

"But if I'm Nicolas Cage, what does that make John?"

"...alive."

He turns his back on you and sits on the cold hard stone.

\--

Two minutes tick by, or something like that. Time is not your element--time belongs to Strider, who is still steadfastly refusing to talk to you, and you'll give your soul to the Old Gods and take a sword throught the gut again before you look at that timer. You think that if you have ever experienced a longer and more terrible two minutes in your entire life you must have done a damn good job of repressing them, because nothing is coming to mind right now.

"Y'know," he says, "I don't want to die."

That snaps you right out of your head because his voice is so small, so broken that you just want to go and hold him, tell him everything will be alright, except it _won't_ you're going to _die_ so instead you just turn to face him.

"Strider, brilliant and insightful as that observation was, nobody wants to die. Furthermore, may I point out that we've both shuffled off this mortal coil before? How bad could doing it again possibly be?"

The sarcasm tastes bitter in your mouth, like one of your mother's martinis. Dave gives you a look.

"For fuck's sake Lalonde, I'm baring my soul to you here. I'm like a fucking catamite, bowing at the foot of your throne in your elaborate pleasure dome, and you think this is a good time to play 'snarky broads and their horseshit'?"

Strider's voice is rising now, the cracks in his already damaged coolkid facade widening. His shades are slipping down his nose, so he grabs them and flings them into the void.

You think it would be best to let him vent.

"We're thirteen years old, for Christ's sake. We're barely even in our fucking teens! And they're making us fight for our lives? What kind of sicko pervert would do that to kids? This is a _game_ , this is supposed to be _fun_! Do you want to know how many times I've died, Rose?"

You really don't. If he says it out loud, it makes it real.

"I've died a little over three hundred times." His voice is quiet, and so very tired. "I've been stabbed, shot, burned, bludgeoned, blown up, eviscerated. Most deaths you can imagine, I've gone through. I was crushed to death by a giant crocodile statue once."

That draws a small laugh from you, and his next words are so quiet you nearly don't hear him mutter "I've even offed myself a few times."

You glance over at him, and he gives you a sad little half-smile that breaks your heart because you know it means he's given up.

"I was going to be someone. I was going to make a name for myself in the world, maybe become a famous DJ or make movies or something. Buy a nice house for Bro so he wouldn't have to live in a shitty apartment and film puppet cock for a living."

"You'd walk down the street and people would say 'It's that guy who writes a blog'?"

"Yeah, they'd prostrate themselves at my impeccably shined shoes, hoping for a little bit of my wisdom, dispensed in packets of five hundred words or less."

"And where would the rest of us fit in this future of yours?"

"Well shit, it's obvious, ain't it? Jade would be your classic mad scientist type, probably have her fingers in every technological pie the planet has to offer. John would be a famous actor and star in a whole slew of shitty movies. You'd be a crazy cat lady writing about shrivelled wizard dick, and we'd all be together. We'd all be together and we'd all be alive and none of us would have to die, _ever_."

He looks straight at you for the first time since he threw away his shades, and there are tears streaking his face, running around the corners of that sad, broken smile.

You realize that you're crying too.

You both turn to look at the timer.

1:30

He says "Rose, I know nothing about sports," choking back a sob, but you know what he really means. He's so fucking scared and it's written all over his face, so you just say "me too, Dave."

And then the two of you are flying across the gap between your slabs, and you're holding on to each other like lifelines, like the guard rail on the roof when you're about to jump, like the brake lever on the crashing train. You look up at him and his eyes are red red _red_ and then you are _kissing_ him and oh god it is so _wrong_ but it's right all the same.

He whispers into your hair "I will never let you go" and you sob into his stupid purple pajamas as his tears fall on the top of your head.

You grip him tighter and kiss him again. He is your other half, the blinding light to your stygian gloom, and you will not lose him again, you are not letting go, not even to return to your slab, damn the consequences. The two of you are broken, so very broken, but the jagged edges fit together in just the right way and you _need_ each other and you think you lo--

0:00

There is a burst of light and a soundless rushing, like a flock of imaginary doves.

It surrounds the two of you, rips you apart, and you are gone.

**Author's Note:**

> Hooray, I actually finished something for once.
> 
> Again, many thanks to [lantadyme](http://lantadyme.tumblr.com) for beta reading. Her helpful criticism made this story a good 20% cooler.
> 
> Also, I am on [tumblr](http://rogerssalademporium.tumblr.com) if you feel the urge.
> 
> (Sorry for changing things around. I figured it would work better as a single chapter.)


End file.
